[texhax] how to use lettergothic?

[Reinhard Kotucha]

First of all, let me explain the difference between a character and a
glyph.  A glyph is a visual representation of a character.  Visual
representations of the character "a" could be "{\bf a}" or "{\it a}".

On 22 February 2009 D. R. Evans wrote:

 > Oh... I see; I shouldn't have used
 >   \font\rm=ugmr8r
 > 
 > I should have used
 >   \font\rm=ugmr8t
 > 
 > (although I don't understand what the "r" and "t" signify; but I see that
 > one produces the correct result [i.e., with spaces between words], whereas
 > the other doesn't).

They are encoded differently.  A Type1 font can contain an arbitrary
number of glyps.  In a Type1 font every glyph has a name.  Computer
programs assign a number to each character.  TeX can only use 256
characters at the same time, while most Type1 fonts contain more than
256 glyphs.  In order to make all glyphs available, you have to
provide several encoding vectors, each one supporting at most 265
glyphs.  An encoding vector is an array which contains exactly 265
glyph names.  Encoding vectors are human readable and have the
extension .enc.

For each encoding you need a separate .tfm file.  TeX is only
interested in .tfm files.  Post-processors like dvips or dvipdf* are
responsible for actual font inclusion, TeX only writes the name of the
tfm file into the dvi file.

For each subset of a particular font, there is a unique tfm file.  How
do post-processors know what to do?  Well, this information is in the
.map files, for instance "psfonts.map".

Everything is brilliantly explained in the dvips manual.

You might wonder why things can't be done automatically in the
background.  Unfortunately, not all fonts are compliant with current
standards (the Adobe Glyph List) and manual interaction is
unavoidable.

 >> Exception: unless you are using XeTeX or (one day) LuaTeX, in
 >> which case you can use system fonts by their system names.

TeX never prevented you to use reasonable names.  You can say

\font\rm=Palatino

if there is a file "Palatino.tfm".

The only purpose of Karl Berry's naming scheme is to support
old-fashioned operating systems.

You don't need XeTeX or LuaTeX if this is all you want.  

 > Life will be so much easier when TeX fonts are automagically
 > handled like fonts in the rest of the system.

Do all your sytem fonts work perfectly always?  Not everything can be
done automatically.

 > To me it's still black magic, even after years of sporadic fighting
 > with it. If it weren't for people like you, I'd still be using
 > Computer Modern for everything.

I don't want to use Computer Modern for everything.  I prefer Palatino
as a text font and Latin Modern Typewriter for program code.

However, it's easy to accomplish.  On Windows, just copy all fonts
from (TeX Live assumed) texmf-dist/fonts/opentype to C:\Windows\Fonts
and re-boot.

On Unix the procedure is quite similar, but you have to create the
fonts.dir and fonts.scale files.  But if a particular font is
supported by your Linux distro, it's sufficient to install it.

Then start firefox and edit File->Preferences->Content->Fonts&Colors.  

On both, the Unix machine at home and the Windows machine at work, the
default text font is Palatino and the default font for program code is
Latin Modern Teletype.  It's quite pleasant.

Regards,
  Reinhard

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Reinhard Kotucha			              Phone: +49-511-3373112
Marschnerstr. 25
D-30167 Hannover	                      mailto:reinhard.kotucha at web.de
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